The Court of Appeal has replaced Jake Boles’s fully suspended sentences for coercive control and five assaults causing harm with concurrent sentences that require him to serve one year in prison, subject to credit for any time spent on remand.
The court delivered judgment on 21 July 2023 on an application by the Director of Public Prosecutions under section 2 of the Criminal Justice Act 1993. It found the Circuit Criminal Court sentences were unduly lenient, quashed them and resentenced Boles. The appeal concerned the sentences, not a new determination of guilt: Boles had pleaded guilty to the offences.
The offences arose from abuse during a relationship that began in 2017. The Court of Appeal described repeated physical violence, threats and emotionally manipulative behaviour over several months. It said the five assaults caused physical and psychological harm, and that their frequency, their commission within an intimate relationship, and one assault in the complainant’s family home aggravated the offences. Two criminal damage counts were taken into consideration at sentencing. A separate sexual assault count had been discontinued by nolle prosequi.
The Circuit Court had imposed concurrent two-year terms on the coercive control and assault counts, suspending each in full for four years subject to conditions. The Court of Appeal accepted that substantial mitigation supported leniency, including Boles’s guilty pleas, youth at the time, lack of previous convictions and efforts towards rehabilitation. But it held that the assault headline sentences should have been five years rather than three, and that fully suspending the sentences failed to provide the custodial component warranted by the gravity of the offending.
For coercive control, the appeal court imposed a three-year headline sentence, reduced it by one year for mitigation and suspended a further year for four years. The resulting term is two years, with one year to be served and the final year suspended.
For each assault, it imposed a five-year headline sentence, reduced it by two years for mitigation and suspended a further two years for four years. Each resulting term is three years, with one year to be served and two years suspended. All sentences run concurrently, so the total immediate prison term is one year. The suspended portions carry the same conditions imposed by the Circuit Court. The court said the sentences run from the date of resentencing, with credit for any remand time.
The source judgment identifies the complainant by that description; this draft preserves her anonymity.